How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we find that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically significant...

This paper develops and estimates a model to explain the behaviour of house prices in the United States. The main finding is that over 70% of the increase in house prices relative to trend during the increase of house prices in the United States from 1995 to 2006 can be explained by a pricing...

According to empirical studies, the life cycle of labor supply volatility exhibits a U-shaped pattern. This may lead to the conclusion that demographic change induces a drop in output volatility. We present an overlapping generations model that replicates the empirically observed pattern and...

Business cycle fluctuations in the U.S. employment-to-population ratio are asymmetric: deviations below trend (troughs) are larger than deviations above trend (peaks). This asymmetry has a "scarring effect," which reduces the average level of the employment-to-population ratio around which the...

Using micro data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey and Current Population Survey, I document that government spending shocks affect individuals differently over the life cycle. Young households increase their consumption after an expansionary shock while prime-age households reduce it,...

The paper reports the principal findings of a long term research project on the description and explanation of business cycles. The research strongly confirmed the older view that business cycles have large systematic components that take the form of investment cycles. These quasi-periodic...

We present an Uncertainty Perception Indicator (UPI) for Germany based on the dynamic topic modelling technique RollingLDA. In contrast to conventional LDA, where all data is processed in one go, the recursive structure of RollingLDA ensures that data is made available for modeling as soon as it...